Hello, I'm your host, Brian Kalanick.
What's the next move for Seattle City Council members after a mayoral veto of their plan for police funding and the resignation of Police Chief Carmen Best?
How will the city respond to unauthorized homeless encampments with its plan to defund the navigation team?
And what's the city's plan to reconnect Seattle during the closure of the West Seattle Bridge?
Council members Lisa Herbold and Andrew Lewis join me to answer these questions and the ones you're sending in, too, next on Council Edition.
I've really grown to believe that looking at other experts to respond to some percentage of 911 calls is something that we have to do.
I am not supportive, and I doubt my colleagues are, of just renewing a status quo navigation team without some significant changes.
All that and more coming up next on City Inside Out, Council Edition.
And we are joined remotely by Councilmember Lisa Herbold out of District 1, representing the area from West Seattle down to South Park.
Also with us, Councilmember Andrew Lewis, representing District 7 from Pioneer Square out to Magnolia.
Thank you both very much for joining me, especially during the Council recess.
I know this is a challenging time here, and I want to dive right into it here.
Councilmember Lewis, let me start with you.
It has been a tumultuous last few months, to say the least, for the city and the City Council in particular, especially now after a series of vetoes from the mayor's office regarding the council's proposals for police funding.
Before we get into the big budgeting details, I want to ask about trying to hit the reset button with mayor as Council President Lorena Gonzalez talked about in the Times recently here.
I know that you spoke about the very real friction between the second and seventh floor a few weeks ago in a city council meeting.
So how do you change that?
Try to provide a unified front at a time of multiple emergencies in the city and a lot of people looking for leadership.
Yeah, thanks for that question, Brian, because, you know, the people of Seattle really want to see their government, you know, get along and start getting results in this really difficult time with all the pressures we're facing.
You know, I think the best comments during our discussions about trying to come together and work out our differences were from my colleague, Council Member Morales, who wanted to say, you know, I just want to make sure that we're sending a message to a lot of the young people in our city, that it's okay to disagree.
And that disagreement is not something that should be shunned or avoided just because it's uncomfortable.
And so I wanna start by saying that, I think that's absolutely true.
I don't think that just for the sake of getting along, that the council and the communities and the folks that we've been working with should be expected to abdicate water down or give up on their very real policy goals and the things that they want to pursue, many of which are long overdue.
But I think that we do have an obligation to acknowledge the respective roles that all of us have as city leaders in shaping policies that are workable and acknowledge the leverage and the different positions, right?
Council can appropriate funds.
Mayor can decide whether she wants to spend the funds or not.
When we really start talking and getting into the details, it's clear that there's a lot of commonality in ways that we can work together to make sure those investments are prioritized.
I think the compromise the council and the mayor reached on the COVID relief bill is a great example.
We've put millions, we're going to be putting millions of dollars out in 2020 and 2021 to get real food relief on the ground, $9 million in grocery vouchers, $8 million additional dollars in rent relief.
You know, these are the kinds of things that matter on the ground to people in Seattle that are facing incredible deprivation because of the COVID crisis.
And, you know, we need to come to some of these agreements because at the end of the day, what we're all accountable to, all of us are accountable to the people of Seattle in delivering your results.
And I think that that's going to be the way we're going to resolve this friction, is by working together, by working collaboratively, we can get resources out there for people that are really in need, and we can make a difference.
And I think that we saw that with the COVID relief bill, and hopefully we can repeat that with our police restructuring efforts.
Which we're going to get to in just a second.
But Lisa, I want to make sure that you weigh in here.
You've worked at City Hall for so many years, over the course of two decades plus.
I'm not sure if there's ever been a time when we've had this many Mayoral vetoes facing the council in such a short amount of time here.
I'm just trying to figure out how do you hope to hit the reset button in this very challenging time?
Yeah, I think I've worked at City Hall under the administrations of Schell, Nichols, McGinn, and Murray.
And it is true.
I mean, every administration, there are Seattle Times editorials that say how dysfunctional City Hall is.
And there's never been a time when the relationship between the mayor and the council has been so bad.
And it's actually true right now.
But I also think it's really important to realize that whereas the council and the mayor traditionally have a rocky relationship because we have different roles as part of making government function, these are unprecedented times.
People have needs and those needs are real.
Businesses have needs, communities have needs, and we need to both have the grace to recognize that the conflict is because we all care very deeply about addressing those needs and recognize that we're all coming from the right place but we have some different ideas about how to do the right thing.
I think that's that's really important for us to hold on to moving forward.
Thank you for that.
I want to dive into some of these details here specific to the budget rebalancing the council has been working on As Council Member Lewis brought up, the mayor and the council were able to agree on that COVID relief package, which is some good news there.
But police spending has been the sticking point, and one of the most controversial pieces, this idea of laying off officers.
And Council Member Herbold, I'll start with you here.
Just a general question to start the dialogue, if I could.
You and Council Member Lewis were talking about wanting to hire more officers last fall on the campaign trail.
Now we're talking about defunding.
I'm trying to let people know what happened between then and now.
Yeah, I mean, I have a long history, both as an activist before becoming a bureaucrat, before becoming a council member, a long history of being an ardent advocate for growing the size of our police department in order to deliver better public safety results.
whether or not it was acting as an aide to Council Member Nick Licata, and convincing the city to add its first patrol officer since the 70s, to being a neighborhood organizer in low-income communities of color, where those communities of color were calling for equal access to limited police resources to respond to 911 calls.
My belief has always been you deliver better public safety by adding more police.
In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I started listening to these calls to defund police, reimagine public safety, the whole spectrum, the spectrum that recognizes that reform wasn't enough.
And I started listening to everybody from activists to advocates to even police officers.
who are saying, we are asking our police officers doing patrol on the beat to do too much.
I often quote a police chief in Dallas who says, you have problems in school, you ask the police.
You have problems with homelessness, you ask the police.
You have problems with mental health, you ask the police.
The fact that we are asking police officers to do so much means two things.
It means that an armed officer comes to every 911 call, even when one may not be needed.
And so that isn't always the safest thing, the safest response for everybody involved.
And you're also reducing the capacity of armed patrol officers to be able to address real crime.
And I've really grown to believe that looking at other experts to respond to some percentage of 911 calls is something that we have to do.
Nationally, over 20% of 911 calls are related to homelessness.
Yeah, right, right.
And I want to make sure that I bring in Council Member Lewis here, just in terms of what changed for you with this idea of needing to hire more officers to improve public safety to this idea of the position you're in right now.
Tell me about that, please.
Yeah, well, you know, when you get into office, as you know, as Councilmember Herbold knows, and a lot of my colleagues know, you get access to a lot more information.
You know, you get access to information from departments, from community members.
And I similarly, you know, coming into this position as a prosecutor, had certain assumptions about our public safety system and the need to increase officer hiring.
When we got into the, and you know, I believe that Brian firmly as recently as February when we had the staffing update from the department.
What really changed is when we had that briefing from the Seattle Police Department in the late spring, where they said 56% of their calls are non-criminal calls.
And actually, I've requested last week an analysis from SPD just based on how much of your call volume could go to a low-acuity responder like the HealthONE program, like the mobile crisis team.
Like, you know, I've talked a lot about crisis assistance helping out in the streets, the cahoots...
Down in Eugene, yeah.
Eugene Morgan has.
You know, like a low acuity first response system like that, how many of those calls could those take?
And, you know, the department's gonna look at that and report back to us.
But I think that's really what we need to be talking about is we certainly need more first response, but I'm not convinced anymore that it needs to be the police based on the data and the information we've been presented.
Thank you for that.
And Council Member Herbold, let's dive into some of the details here.
One of the most controversial pieces behind re-imagining policing is this idea of laying off officers out of order to make sure the SPD's more diverse new cops stay on the force.
Chief Best, I know, did not want to engage on this, really.
The concern over layoffs, part of the reason at least she resigned.
Do you want to stick with this plan, then, to ask Chief Diaz now to petition the Public Safety Civil Service Commission for out-of-order layoffs?
Do you think he will work with you on that?
I sure hope so.
It became apparent that the problem wasn't the out-of-order rule in the Public Safety Civil Service Commission policy.
It was really that the chief did not want to lay off any officers.
We kept on saying, well there's a rule it exists it exists to be used um let's work with the law department to see how it can be used it's been used in other cities we have expertise within the city family on using this rule um and the the chief has great latitude in defining what makes for efficient operations of her department in requesting layoffs and that's this that's the legal standard is efficiency in running her department.
And so there are ways that the community asked us to pursue.
They asked us to look at officers with multiple sustained complaints, but there are other ways to do layoffs.
For instance, the council reduced some specialty units, eliminated other specialty units.
The normal layout process would be that those officers wouldn't get laid off in those specialty units, but the new officers without any seniority would.
Well, the chief could request that the officers within those specialty units be the ones to be laid off and she could make an argument.
that would help her efficiently run her department.
These were not cuts, right?
These were what are called provisos, and they would have only gone into effect in November, and the savings they would have resulted in is a savings from 100 positions, 40 of them were from, 45 were from the specialty officer, the specialty unit reductions or eliminations.
30 of them were from attrition and another 25 were actual layoffs of other officers.
But we built in a buffer by using a proviso that if we were unsuccessful in bargaining the layoffs like we wanted to bargain them, The council was putting ourselves in a box where we would have to legally lift our own provisos to continue paying those officers through the end of the year until we were successful in bargaining.
That's really, really important to recognize that one, the provisos are provisos that only the chief could enact.
And we need the cooperation of any chief and any executive in order to enact them.
So in a way, they were recommendations.
And two, we had built in a buffer that we would continue paying the officers through the end of the year if we were unsuccessful in negotiations.
Thank you for breaking that part down, because that is very important.
Council Member Lewis, I want to bring in here.
Your most recent newsletter talked about layoffs of officers with sustained complaints against them.
And Council Member Herbold brought this up earlier.
Your thoughts about that, the challenges of making something like that happen and working with some of these rules from the Civil Service Commission that really haven't been tested before, a lot of challenges involved.
Yeah, thanks for that, Brian.
And Council Member Herbold's summary right now is just terrific.
Because I think that one of the things that's been most frustrating, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
And there has been a lot of misrepresentation of those 100 positions.
And I tried to get at that in that very long newsletter.
And I appreciate that you went all the way through it.
Cover to cover, yep.
Yeah, that was part of the criticism on my staff.
Is this too long?
No one will read it.
But I think it's important because a majority of those 100 positions are cuts that have been made by the chief and the mayor.
They're attritional.
They're based on a hiring freeze that they've put in place.
The suggestion that we're coming in and just willy-nilly eliminating 100 positions, a majority of those positions are already gone based on executive actions that the mayor and the chief have taken.
So, you know, and we're entitled to disagree, but I think we need to stipulate to that really important fact that shows actually that the council and the mayor are closer on this point than the rhetoric would seem to imply.
One of the things I've been frustrated by, and Council Member Herbold touched on this, is sort of this desire on the part of the department to not lay off any officers.
And my response to that is, really?
You don't wanna lay off any officers?
You know, and I requested from OPA that there's 24 officers, that have sustained complaints of either dishonesty or excessive use of force.
We should not have any officers in our department who are liars.
As a former prosecutor, I don't know how you would put them on the stand and win a case if they have a sustained example of them lying.
I don't know how they're useful as an officer anymore to the city.
Or who have brutalized citizens.
And we should be able to stipulate as a council and as a mayor that we will petition for out-of-order layoffs for those officers.
And I was suggesting that as a starting point.
And the total of that would be, in revising the Proviso strategy, would be, you know, the 55 attritional losses, plus those 24 officers with excessive use of force and dishonesty complaints.
And now, you know, I mean, certainly there's other types of complaints that are concerning, but for the sake of conversation, I was starting there and saying, look, no one in the city should want brutal or dishonest cops on our police force.
Let's work together and try to get rid of those officers and move forward with a department that emphasizes higher standards.
Okay.
Okay.
Thank you for that.
I want to dive in next to the navigation team.
The council voted to defund this group.
The nav team does homeless outreach for the city with mixed results, especially when it comes to getting people into shelter.
This was a very close vote for the council and Council Member Herbold.
You were a yes.
Council Member Lewis, you were a no.
Council Member Herbold, why do you support defunding the navigation team for one?
And is there a plan to replace that team's function within the city?
My role in the council since coming to the council as a representative of District 1 has been really focused on convincing my colleagues on the council that the navigation team was a policy and approach and a practice that could be reformed.
And so for four years, I have really scrutinized the work of the navigation team.
And one of the things that I've really come to believe is that even as the council has been focused on trying to ensure that the navigation team responds to communities, individuals, residents, business owners who have concerns about people living outdoors, that we really are focused on harm reduction for folks who are living outside.
And so even as we try to improve the second half of that equation, It felt like, and the evidence showed, that the city was finding ways to avoid applying those reforms, those better practices.
And more and more encampments were being classified as obstructions, not entitled to advance notice, not entitled to outreach from outreach workers.
And in February, I'm sorry, in April, Council Member Lewis and I and Council Member Mosqueda reached out to the executive with a framework, four-page framework for how we can work together non-legislatively because we had council members at that point who were saying that they were gonna be proposing legislation.
to ban the activities of the navigation team.
Myself, Council Member Lewis, and Council Member Mosqueda reached out to the executive, offered a non-legislative solution, working together collaboratively to address many of the concerns that we have been hearing over the years around the navigation team's practices.
We did not receive any response to that request.
So when I voted to reduce the funding from the navigation team, it was out of concern that this partnership of working with the executive towards continuous collaboration and continuous improvement had come to an end.
And I could not continue to support the navigation team without believing that there was a continued commitment on the part of the executive to improve the practices.
Thank you very much for that.
Council Member Lewis, I know you voted no on this plan, but you held a town hall recently with this idea that we are moving ahead with a post-navigation team Seattle here.
I want to throw you a question from a viewer with concerns in your district.
Josh writes this.
Since Seattle Parks left their facility as COVID-19 took hold, Denny Park has transformed into a dangerous encampment with people in need of assistance, the park grounds destroyed and surrounding properties suffering in turn.
What's the plan there?
I wanna, if you could, Council Member Lewis, talk about that specific concern and future ones without the navigation.
Yeah, I mean, you know, part of my concern and why I voted against getting rid of the navigation team is, is, you know, I wanted to put, you know, forming the new plan, you know, in front.
I mean, I do want to stipulate, and as I mentioned in my recent letter, this council has spent a lot of time this year trying to put that plan in place, but it's sort of, you know, it kind of, it takes two to dance on that.
And like, we haven't had an extensive amount of cooperation from the executive on forming that replacement plan.
But, you know, I am not supportive, and I doubt my colleagues are, of just renewing a status quo navigation team without some significant changes.
And I'll tell you, you know, I've talked to those navigation team folks to say, you know, what can make your mission more impactful.
What they tell me, Brian, is, you know, if we had more tiny house villages to offer, like tiny house village placements, we'd be getting people out of encampments all over the place.
Right, you know, like they asked me, you know, I talked to someone the other day, I won't say who.
But you know, they said, you know, 75% of the people we do outreach to would in a second take a tiny house if there was an offer.
And, you know, if we could get 300 more tiny houses at an annual cost of about, you know, I don't know, maybe be six or 7 million a year.
Um, you know, that would dramatically increase the efficacy of our outreach, not just for the NAP team, but for REACH and a lot of our other partners, or other kinds of exits, right?
I mean, in agriculture, I mean, you just go down the list.
And that's really the center of gravity for this problem, Brian, is we just don't have exits on the other side of the outreach.
And there is a futility that has been recognized by a number of my colleagues on the council, myself and a lot of community members, to sort of a musical chairs exercise that moves people around the city.
So to circle back to Denny Park, I mean, I would say this, you know, my issue with overemphasizing the NAB team as an intervention or at least sweeping as a policy is if we, you know, I mean, we swept in the late spring Ballard Commons Park.
Ballard Commons Park is basically back to where it was in the late spring because there just weren't enough exits to get the people themselves into a better placement.
My concern is that if we sweep Denny Park and there's not a bigger, you know, effort or intervention, I mean, you know, gradually over the next couple weeks, I mean, there will be more camping in Denny Park.
There's a couple of different initiatives that I think are really promising, you know, that the Public Defender Association is doing a lot of initiatives around hoteling.
And like, COVID has really made it clear.
So, you know, COVID has de-intensified the jail, it's de-intensified the shelters.
And those are just, you know, the enforcement mechanism is hampered by the fact that, like, I don't want to imply that homelessness is a public safety thing, but for people to say, what about some law and order?
I'm like, well, the courts are closed, you know, the jails are closed.
Like, even if we wanted to, that's not an option.
But you know, what COVID has also done is just wiped out hotels.
And we've got a lot of hotel owners out there who are really interested in making deals for like the next year to, you know, to get through.
And so I would say this, hoteling, tiny houses, like these are interventions that actually aren't colossally expensive, you know, especially when they're weighed actually against jail and like a larger approach, way cheaper.
So that's what we need to be focused on.
Thank you.
I need to start wrapping up the show here, and Councilmember Herbold, got to talk about the West Seattle Bridge, one of four declared city emergencies in the city right now.
If you can keep this brief, I'd love to hear it.
I know we're close to an announcement from SDOT about the future here, a repair or replace, whatever else.
Tell me if you could briefly about what you're keeping closest eye on here as we move forward with this major project.
Councilmember Herbold?
I'm sorry, you might be muted there.
Let's try that again.
Sorry about that.
There are several moving parts that are really critical to addressing this really huge infrastructure project that moves 100,000 people a day or moved 100,000 people a day.
And I think what I am trying to keep an eye on is to ensure that the city is moving forward with a sense of urgency.
And I'm really pleased that the work that SDOT has been doing thus far is all work that would have to be done regardless of whether or not we are deciding to repair or replace.
So the work that's being done right now, the stabilization work, has to be done in either event.
And so we aren't losing time during decision-making, because this work that we're doing right now, the actual physical work, has to be done, and it takes the amount of time that we're taking to do that stabilization work.
And so sort of the sequencing of both the physical work and the decision making on the part of SDOT, I think has been really great.
And I think it does show that SDOT has a sense of urgency.
They're not just doing one thing sequentially, they're doing many things together.
I hear routinely from constituents, some who say, hurry up and repair it already.
Others who say, Who would even consider repairing it?
Just replace it.
And both sides seem to be completely unaware that there are just as many people on either side of the decision-making between repair or replace.
And so I'm glad also to be a part of the West Seattle Bridge Stakeholders Group that has been working to design the criteria that will be used for making the decision, the cost benefit analysis criteria for making those decisions.
And I'm also really pleased that SDOT has moved forward on hiring a replacement design engineer, because even if we choose repair, replacement of the bridge will be needed at some day.
And then finally, all the mitigation work that SDOT has to be doing to address the traffic needs throughout the city where the detours are has also been critically important to communities who have experienced an increase in traffic impact since the closure of the bridge.
The SDOT has made 175 different changes throughout the detour routes in West Seattle and South Park.
And so really keeping an eye on the changes that have already been made and the changes that are promised to be made and making sure that they're aligned with the community priorities is really important as well.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
And we are just about out of time, but maybe, Councilmember Lewis, I can ask you to chime in here.
I know some of these discussions have been happening around the Magnolia Bridge in your district for many, many years.
Your thoughts, just to wrap up the show here, lessons learned from the West Seattle Bridge Project.
Yeah, you know, I mean, I think that what we've really seen in talking to Councilmember Peterson, too, about this is we've got a problem in the city with bridges.
I mean, like bridges all over the city are in need of a lot of deferred maintenance, need of replacement.
And we really need to look at how we can put together a comprehensive bridge package citywide.
I would like to see that, you know, the Ballard Bridge and the Magnolia Bridge in my district included.
in some kind of package like that, because, you know, the bridges in the city are an essential piece of our infrastructure.
We've seen the massive destabilizing impact that it can have when one fails, like the West Seattle Bridge has, and it's a wake-up call.
Like, we got to come together, and we got to have a package to address all these.
Impact fees have been raised as a possible way to do it.
And, you know, I'm supportive of looking at any creative option, because we need to move on this.
It's a priority for me, and I know it's a priority for the council.
All right, thank you both very much for joining me again during the recess here.
Very much appreciate it.
And we'll see you next time on Council Edition.